Unfortunately, I cannot think of a single elementary school teacher that ever really made me want to learn anything. This does not mean that I was anti-learning; rather, none of them ever inspired me to want know more. If anything, I would say that the majority of my teachers had the opposite effect on me. I learned to dislike math when we were learning addition and subtraction of fractions, and hate it when we were learning the multiplication tables. I have never done well with timed tests, and having to be able to complete 100 problems in under a minute only hurt my self esteem. Children sitting nearby would finish them with time to spare whereas I would struggle getting halfway done. I could remember most of them, it just took me so long to get it out. I would look at the stickers at the top of other students papers and flip mine upside down in shame. I stopped fully enjoying reading in the third grade when we had to read out loud. While other kids were tripping over the words on the page, I would read ahead, fascinated by the life cycle of the butterfly or the animals in the rainforest. When it would come time for it to be my turn, I would never know what paragraph we were on. Other kids would stare at me, as if to say, “how stupid can you be?”. I would get in trouble for reading under my desk during other class discussions. From this, I learned how to let words from students wash over me, like rain off an umbrella. Information that would never be absorbed as I sat upright at my desk, numbly following along with the rest of the class. Many of the books that we had to read were far below my reading ability, and I couldn’t even follow along with the slow pace the class had set. I cannot say that my parents did not prevent me from completely slipping under. At a very early age, they instilled a love of reading. But it wasn’t enough to keep me from despising assigned reading. (Later, in high school, I would be the only person to actually do the assigned reading, I would stay up all night, page after page until it was done in a week. I would be the only person to actually care about what the author was saying. But until I was out of elementary school, I couldn’t seem to find it in me to care.) When I was younger, we used to visit my mom’s sister quite frequently. Her husband would always show me and my sister these small projects - “experiments” - that he was making. Potato clocks and little radio type things. A tube that you rub a sock on and touch it to a metal post to see a small bolt of lightning. Although I wasn’t quite sure why it was fascinating, because I had seen electricity in action before, I always looked forward to seeing what he had done. He would always explain his projects very clearly, so even at a fairly young age, I could understand reasonably well what was happening. So even when I got to middle school and we started doing "science experiments", strictly regulated projects with no thought required, and a formulated lab report, I was still relatively interested in science. Even though I hated science in school, I still had a respect for it and a personal interest. School taught me to go through the motions, but people taught me to care.
I learned to dislike math when we were learning addition and subtraction of fractions, and hate it when we were learning the multiplication tables. I have never done well with timed tests, and having to be able to complete 100 problems in under a minute only hurt my self esteem. Children sitting nearby would finish them with time to spare whereas I would struggle getting halfway done. I could remember most of them, it just took me so long to get it out. I would look at the stickers at the top of other students papers and flip mine upside down in shame.
I stopped fully enjoying reading in the third grade when we had to read out loud. While other kids were tripping over the words on the page, I would read ahead, fascinated by the life cycle of the butterfly or the animals in the rainforest. When it would come time for it to be my turn, I would never know what paragraph we were on. Other kids would stare at me, as if to say, “how stupid can you be?”. I would get in trouble for reading under my desk during other class discussions. From this, I learned how to let words from students wash over me, like rain off an umbrella. Information that would never be absorbed as I sat upright at my desk, numbly following along with the rest of the class. Many of the books that we had to read were far below my reading ability, and I couldn’t even follow along with the slow pace the class had set.
I cannot say that my parents did not prevent me from completely slipping under. At a very early age, they instilled a love of reading. But it wasn’t enough to keep me from despising assigned reading. (Later, in high school, I would be the only person to actually do the assigned reading, I would stay up all night, page after page until it was done in a week. I would be the only person to actually care about what the author was saying. But until I was out of elementary school, I couldn’t seem to find it in me to care.)
When I was younger, we used to visit my mom’s sister quite frequently. Her husband would always show me and my sister these small projects - “experiments” - that he was making. Potato clocks and little radio type things. A tube that you rub a sock on and touch it to a metal post to see a small bolt of lightning. Although I wasn’t quite sure why it was fascinating, because I had seen electricity in action before, I always looked forward to seeing what he had done. He would always explain his projects very clearly, so even at a fairly young age, I could understand reasonably well what was happening. So even when I got to middle school and we started doing "science experiments", strictly regulated projects with no thought required, and a formulated lab report, I was still relatively interested in science. Even though I hated science in school, I still had a respect for it and a personal interest. School taught me to go through the motions, but people taught me to care.